What's Taters, Precious?

It's almost time! Two weeks until the potatoes go in. (Potatoes get planted on St. Patrick's Day out here.) Yippeeee! I'm so ready to start planting.
This year I am going to put the potatoes under straw.
Last year we tried the method of putting the potatoes in tires and then adding another tire and more dirt as the tops grew up and up. We did harvest a little early but we did not get near the yield we were expecting from this method. It was also a major pain to pull the tire stack apart (nothing like the "ease" promised in all the articles) after it had sat full of dirt over a period of time. Of course we should have known this, afterall, the tire itself was heavy enough to haul around and lift onto the stack and then filled with dirt? Yeah, it wasn't pretty.
I have seen several people around here grow their potatoes under straw. Usually they have the straw along the side of an out building somewhere and place the seed potatoes under it. When it comes time to harvest, you just have to lift the straw up. It's kind of like an easter egg hunt, only with potatoes, and they're all one color, and they're pretty much all in one place.
The articles I have read all relate that their method of growing potatoes in straw involves a deep bed of straw rather than the few inches of straw the people around here use.
Now I am torn as to which way to try. I think I will get the ol' tires out, dust them off and take them for one more spin to see if they might do the trick. I'm just going to fill my tire stack with straw this time around and hopefully it won't be such a mess to take down when it is harvest time. Maybe we'll run a row of shallow straw and try some potatoes under it to see how they do as well.
One way or another, all I want is some nice Yukon Golds this year. I'm tired of listening to all the locals tell me how good the potatoes are - how you don't even have to butter them because they taste like they're already buttered. I'm sick of listening, I want to start tasting for myself!